Milton's Burden of Interpretation.

Dayton Haskin's book is a comprehensive examination of the historical and cultural specificity of renaissance hermeneutics, particularly concerning the ways in which Milton approached the biblical text. The burden of interpretation that gives Haskin his title rests upon the reader who must assure his or her salvation in a readerly viligance that wards off the possibility of temporary faith and final reprobation. To get at Milton's relationship with these spiritual demands, Haskin examines the biblical "place" - specifically the parable of talents (Matthew 25:1430) - most frequently associated with Milton. Haskin critiques biographers of Milton who privilege a positive reading of this parable in terms of Milton's life and work, yet Haskin generally upholds the centrality of this particular "place" in his consideration of Miltonic places. Haskin's qualification of the parable's application is to suggest for Milton an anxious relationship with its potentially burdensome demands.

The effect that this tendency to focus on the parable of talents has had on Milton scholarship is nicely set out by Haskin in a section that considers its impact on translations of Milton. Haskin examines the way that Milton's use of the Latin ingenium has been rendered as "talents," an etymological anachronism that elides the discrepancy between seventeenth-century usage and its modern sense of natural ability. The inaccurate translation, then, is responsible for biographical inferences suggesting the importance of the parable to Milton, inferences that in turn influence future translations, thus compounding error. This is a vivid example of the ways in which editors and translators influence their textual material.

To infer Milton's interpretative theory, Haskin examines his exegesis. Haskin argues that, in the divorce pamphlets, "Milton attempts to get his reader to accept a more fluid interpretation that includes figurative senses as part of the divine speaker's intention" (69). Here Haskin focuses on Milton's reading of the biblical prohibition on fornication. It is curious that Haskin chooses this "place" where Milton is expanding the authority of restrictions rather than a moment more suggestive of Milton seeking a liberating fluidity. His citations of the two title pages of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce also seem to suggest, through Milton's use of the phrases "Scripture . . . recover'd to their long-lost meaning" (Haskin 73) and "Restor'd . . . to the true meaning of Scripture" (Haskin 74), a desire to fix "true" meaning rather than allow fluidity. But as this section continues, Haskin persuasively reveals the way in which Milton plays with the received opinion on divorce and its biblical places, reworking it into a loving action in accord with what the remainder of the chapter constructs as Milton's sense of the general tenor of the Scripture, "the rule of charity" (76).

The second half of the book, from chapter four on, builds on the theoretical concerns worked out in the first half as it approaches Sonnet 19 ("When I consider") and the three large works, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost. To my mind, this is where Haskin is at his best. He offers a solid reading of Sonnet 19 that disrupts the conventional autobiographical reading that has become orthodox since Newton entitled it "On His Blindness." As for Paradise Lost, Haskin augments the inherited critical notion that the language in the prelapsarian books is already fallen and suggestive of either a predetermined fall for Adam and Eve or the reader's fallen mind, and produces an exciting re-reading of the dynamics of choice. He suggests that interpretation, tangling and plurality, were part of that prelapsarian paradise and that in interpretation (the reading of the Book-of-the-world) is pleasure. Haskin's reading of Michael's revelations in the final books is convincingly tied to his notions of Milton's thinking about biblical "places" and the necessity of their diligent experimental application.

This book is an impressive piece of scholarship. Haskin ranges widely in his primary and secondary material and he establishes Milton's hermeneutic within a "thick" reading of the cultural milieu.

DAVID KINAHAN University of Western Ontario